Eugénio de Andrade

Portuguese poet and translator Eugénio de Andrade was born José Fontinhas in Póvoa de Atalaia, Portugal. After his parents separated, the poet moved with his mother to Lisbon and then Coimbra. Influenced by surrealist thought, ancient Greek poetry, and Japanese haiku, Andrade wrote spare, concrete, lyric poems celebrating the body and the natural world with elemental precision.

“[I]n Eugénio’s poetry, more than any other I can think of, the sound is the sense,” noted translator Alexis Levitin in his introduction to Forbidden Words: The Selected Poems of Eugénio de Andrade (2003). Levitin concluded, “The heart of his genius is woven into the delicate, minutely wrought balance of sound in his words.” Levitin has brought more than ten of Andrade’s numerous collections into English, including Inhabited Heart: The Selected Poems of Eugénio de Andrade (1985), White on White (1987), and Solar Matter: Matéria Solar (1995). Andrade, whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, published more than 20 volumes of poetry during his lifetime, including his debut collection, Narcisco (or Narcissus, 1940), and Poesia, Terra de Minha Mãe (1992), a collaboration with the photographer Dário Gonçalves. Andrade also translated the poetry of Sappho, Federico García Lorca, and Yannis Ritsos into Portuguese.

A member of the Académie Mallarmé in Paris, Andrade received the European Prize for Poetry, the Camões Prize, and France’s Prix Jean Malrieu. He worked as an inspector for the Ministry of Health in Oporto from 1950 to 1983. For the last 15 years of his life, he lived in an apartment within the Foundation of Eugénio de Andrade, which currently hosts several annual literary events and seminars honoring the poet’s work.